“There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself,” comedian Hannah Gadsby says in her new Netflix special, Nanette.

Hannah Gadsby claims multiple times through her comedy special that she is in fact “quitting comedy,” and as she digs painfully through the topics of sexual assault, hate based violence, and the struggle for LGBTQ rights in her native Tasmania (homosexuality wasn’t decriminalized there until the late 90s), it’s hard to argue with her feelings on the subject.

Nanette in and of itself is particularly funny, but as funny as it is, it is also serious. In fact, at various points of the hour and change that Gadsby has your attention, it’s hard to take. But that is the entire point.

The first twenty minutes start off normal enough for a comedy special, including self-deprecating humor, jokes based in her LGBTQ experiences, etc. That’s how Gadsby lures you in, so to speak, to grab your attention. From there it unravels quickly and messily in front of your eyes.

The deconstruction begins with a joke early in the special about a man threatening to beat her up because he thought that she was a man hitting on his girlfriend. It isn’t until later on in the special that she admits that she cut out the rest of the anecdote because the story then became him continuing to attack her.

“I couldn’t tell that story as it actually happened,” said Gadsby in the special. “He beat the shit out of me and nobody stopped him. And I didn’t report that to the police, and I did not take myself to hospital, and I should have.”

She concludes the “joke” with admitting that she didn’t go because she believed that’s all she was worth. “That is what happens when you soak one child in shame, and you give permission to another to hate,” said Gadsby.

I think that’s where I had to stop the special for awhile — and I think a lot of other people have, too. Because what LGBTQ person growing up has not been in some sort of similar situation and thought the same thing? I just sat there, cold.

It’s like the #MeToo movement. A lot of people truly believe that it is about women just now choosing to come out and take a stand, when all of us have always been vocal about these kinds of things that happen, and it’s only now that people have deigned to listen. Through this story, Gadsby points out that the same is true of LGBTQ people. And that is a hard, painful pill to swallow.

From that point on, she refuses to be self-deprecating anymore. Self-deprecation is arguably the most common stand-up trope, but Gadsby argues that it isn’t about humility as much as humiliation. This is also why she refuses to use the lesbian community as a punchline.

“I put myself down in order to speak, in order to seek permission… to speak,” said Gadsby in the special. “And I simply will not do that anymore. Not to myself, or anybody who identifies with me.”

The most passed-around quote from the special is the one I quoted at the beginning of this article: “There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” It is passed around with excitement for a reason — because it is true. It is true about Gadsby, it is true about women, and it sure as shit is true about the LGBTQ community.

Nanette is a difficult special to watch, but it is one that you need to see. It should be required viewing for a long time.

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette is currently streaming on Netflix. Watch it here.

Related Stories

Earlier this week, Gay RVA’s Ash Griffith wrote a great piece about Netflix’s Queer Eye. In it, she talked about how different our society is in 2018 compared to our society when the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy first aired in 2003. She made a great point: Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was [...]